Music & Aesthetic Reflexivity: Morals, Values & Symbolic Boundary Work in Everyday Musical Practices

This paper explores how contemporary youth engage with music in their everyday lives within a globalized, digitized context. Late modern societies and its globalized musical field are characterized as highly individualised, and streaming platforms have reshaped music consumption. Streaming’s decentralization of music distribution has fragmented the musical field, which may weaken the foundation for durable collective musical subcultures, raising new questions about music and its link with identity-construction. Because of the limitations associated with age young people remain bound to the local and reliant on their own strategies of creating spaces of belonging. Thus, music, due to its ubiquitous nature, is one of the most readily available cultural resources youngsters have at their disposal, and because it is a domain ruled by feelings (DeNora, 2000), it becomes a valuable resource for meaning-making. By further expanding on the concept of ‘aesthetic reflexivity’ we pose that the inherently reflexive project of ‘re-configuring agency’ through music is above all a value-oriented and moral process. Based on music-diary reports and in-depth interviews with 28 young adults (aged 18-25 in Antwerp), we find that young people engage in a process of reflexive musical self-selection, curating a varied and highly personal music collection that helps in the constructing of a narrative of the self where the values expressed by or projected upon music play a crucial role in their negotiation of socio-cultural identities. By considering the moral dimension of music appropriation we aim to better understand how music’s ‘affordances’ are informed by the socio-cultural meanings infused within the musical object. We show how respondents actively turn to music as a means of self-management; seeking recognition and resonance with their own issues, values, and aspirations and thus show how music becomes a strategic resource to create spaces of belonging and resistance.